Run: 2026-04-24-01KQ0G45JX3MMDSQ7HM9WQRV1A

The last tube to Richmond had coughed Rory out into a cold that didn't belong to London in May. She walked with her collar up and her phone torch off, because Eva had told her — Eva, who knew these things — that the grove didn't like electric light, and tonight Rory felt disinclined to argue with anything that had preferences. She had come for an answer. That was what she told herself, over and over, as her boots pressed into the soft loam of Richmond Park and the sodium glow of the road receded behind her. Somewhere ahead, between the oaks that leaned like old men listening, was Isolde's grove, and Isolde had said, come alone, come after moonrise, and bring the Heartstone. The pendant rested against her sternum under her jumper, a small warm weight on a silver chain. It had pulsed once on the train, near Putney, and she had thought that was the worst of it. She'd been wrong. The first oak standing stone rose out of the dark like a tooth. She knew it was an oak because Eva had described them — ancient trunks fossilized into something closer to stone than wood, bark gone grey and hard as slate. Four of them, set at the cardinal points. Rory walked between the south stone and the east, and the air changed. It wasn't a gust. It wasn't a sound. It was simply that on one side of that threshold, she could hear the distant drone of the A3, and on the other, she could not. The silence pressed in with the particular density of water. She stopped. Turned. The path she'd come down was still there, dim silver in what moonlight trickled through the canopy, and yet it looked further away than a single step had any right to make it. Wildflowers bloomed at her feet. Harebells, foxglove, something with small white petals she couldn't name. In May. At midnight. She had expected this — Eva had warned her — but expectation was a thin shield against the way the flowers turned, very slightly, as she passed. Not toward her. Away. "Isolde?" Her voice came out smaller than she'd meant. It did not carry. It seemed to land at her own feet and lie there. Rory drew a breath and kept walking. The clearing opened in front of her, ringed by four great stones and fed by a thread of stream that caught the moon in broken pieces. Empty. Of course it was empty; she was early, or Isolde was late, or time in here was doing the thing Eva had told her it would do. An hour could be minutes. An hour could be days. She thought of her phone in her pocket, useless, its clock a liar. She sat on a fallen log at the edge of the water and waited. The first wrongness she noticed was the crickets. There were crickets. That wasn't the wrong part. The wrong part was that they were singing in rhythm — not the layered, overlapping chirr of a real summer meadow, but a single pulse, all of them together, like a heart. Chirr. Silence. Chirr. Silence. As if one mouth were opening and closing and many voices were obliging. Rory set her palm flat against the log to stop it from shaking. The second wrongness was that somewhere, quite close, someone was humming. It was low, and tuneless, and it had the cadence of a woman who did not know she was being overheard. Rory's head turned toward it before she'd decided to let it. Past the north stone, in the deeper black beneath a yew, something pale shifted and was still. She stared. She kept staring, the way you keep staring at a shape in a dark bedroom until it resolves into a dressing gown on a hook. This one did not resolve. It simply was not there, after a moment, and she couldn't remember whether she had seen it go. The humming stopped. The pendant against her chest grew warm. Not the gentle pulse it had given her on the train. This was a slow, steady heat, the heat of a mug of tea held too long. Rory slipped her hand into her jumper and closed her fingers around the gem. It was glowing through the wool, the faintest crimson stain. Warmth when near a Hel portal, Dymas had written in the note that came with it. There shouldn't be a Hel portal here. She stood. Slowly. As though sudden movement might be noticed by something that had not yet fully noticed her. At the edge of her vision, to her left, something passed between two trees. Tall. Upright. Wrong in the gait, though she could not have said how; she'd only caught it with the corner of her eye and when she turned her head it was gone and the wildflowers where it had walked were undisturbed. Her throat had gone dry. The cricket-heart pulsed on, chirr, silence, chirr, and she had the terrible thought that it was keeping time with something, and that the something was close enough now to matter. "Isolde," she said again, and this time her voice cracked in the middle of the name. No answer. Only the humming, starting again, farther off now — or nearer, she couldn't tell; the grove did odd things to sound. She turned a slow circle. The stones looked further apart than they had been. The path out, the gap between the south stone and the east, was not where she had left it. The trees had closed, or she had turned too many times, or — Behind her, something took a breath. It was a long breath, deliberate, the inhalation of a creature that had been holding its lungs still for some while and no longer felt the need. She felt it on the back of her neck, in the small hairs there, a dampness that was almost but not quite warmth. Rory did not turn around. The pendant burned against her skin, bright and steady as a coal, and she understood, with the clean cold clarity she was known for among her friends, that whatever door had opened in the grove tonight, she was standing on the wrong side of it. Very slowly, she began to walk.